Copyright Notice

When I say "post only once," I mean submit your comment only once, not that you may not submit more than one comment. But since comments are moderated, when you submit the comment it won't appear right away. If you submit more than once, it just clutters up my in-box. But someone who has substantive contributions to make is, of course welcome to weigh in more than once in a comment thread. I realize from a few cases now that there's been some misunderstanding about that. Thanks to those who have been commenting on the interesting thread about the youth of secular moral theory.

It is sometimes said (e.g., by Parfit, by Brink, and others) that "secular moral theory" is a relative new field compared to systematic theorizing in the natural sciences, so it is not surprising that there is more disagreement about ethical matters since we haven't had as much time (or made as much effort) to make systematic theoretical progress on the problems. I confess this has always struck me as a somewhat implausible claim. Consider: a perfectly typical "Introduction to Ethics" class (in an ordinary, secular university) might well start with the systematic moral theory of Aristotle, whereas the typical "Introduction to Physics" class will never start with Aristotle's physical theory. Current "secular" ethical theory traces its intellectual routes back over two thousand years. And even if the standard secular ethical canon leaps over a millenium or so, it's still the case that contemporary secular ethical theory has a history of 250 years. Yet can it claim as much progress as "secular" biology, which has a history of about 150 years?

What do readers make of the argument that secular ethical theory is relatively young therefore we should be optimistic about its progress over time? Post only once, comments may take awhile to appear.

Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, well-known for his work in a variety of areas (epistemology, ethics, moral psychology, among others), and a longtime faculty member at Dartmouth College has accepted a senior offer from the Department of Philosophy at Duke University, where he will start in Spring 2010. Duke has made a substantial investment in value theory over the last decade, with senior appointments of Allen Buchanan, Gopal Sreenivasan, Wayne Norman, and now Sinnott-Armstrong.

Meanwhile, Dartmouth has really taken some serious hits at the senior ranks over the last decade, losing, among others, Robert Fogelin to retirement, Sally Sedgwick to the University of Illinois at Chicago, Julia Driver and Roy Sorensen to Washington University in St. Louis, and now Sinnott-Armstrong.

Many readers have sent me links about the murder of Neda Soltani, an Iranian philosophy student shot dead by the theocracy's stormtroopers doing what all lethal agents of the state do, ending life indiscriminately. Some links here, here, and here. She was attending a protest against the fraudulent elections with her philosophy professor and some fellow students. As J. Brendan Ritchie, a grad student at Maryland, wrote to me: "This terrible tragedy is a graphic reminder that there are philosophical colleagues (professors and students) who are fighting on the streets of Tehran for the ideals they have no doubt passionately argued for."

"Nietzsche has a tendency to throw out themes and leave us the task of seeing how they cohere. Many of the essays in this book try to tie up apparent loose ends, and make him say what he should have said if he had followed his insights through. We are entering a new era of Nietzsche studies." Roger Caldwell, Philosophy Now

"This collection of essays contains some of the best recent work on Nietzsche and moral philosophy. The editors state that their aim is to present work that advances the understanding of Nietzsche's ethical views and demonstrates the relevance of those views to contemporary debates in normative ethics, metaethics, and moral psychology. In relation to these two ends, the collection is clearly a success. It presents very good historical scholarship as well as some first-rate work in moral philosophy that engages with the issues that concerned Nietzsche. The collection will certainly be of interest to moral philosophers and to those interested in the history of modern philosophy, and many of the essays should be regarded as essential reading for anyone interested in Nietzsche's engagement with morality."--Scott Jenkins, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews "This volume constitutes a significant advance in the Nietzsche literature. It is among a handful of volumes that anyone with a serious interest in Nietzsche simply must read. It will also be rewarding for anyone who is interested in the way in which moral psychology and action theory bear on ethics." Paul Katsafanas, Mind

Wow. Any private or state school with money for hiring is going to be looking hard at the U of C system for talent next year if this goes through.

UPDATE: A philosopher in the UC system writes:

The UC pay cut is actually more like 10%. That is because a separate decision earlier this year meant that they are, starting next yr, directing 2% of our pay into our pensions. So the 8% cut will come on top of the 2% cut. And none of that factors in the lack of cost of living increases for many, many yrs. Most UC faculty are already making 20-30% lower than market rates. Subtract another 10% and you're right, it could be the end of UC being a preeminent school. With ten campuses (including UCSF), a 20% cut in state funding is effectively not (state) funding at all two whole campuses.

Due to other pressing obligations, I haven't been following this matter carefully, but Peter Momtchiloff calls my attention to an interesting chart from The Guardian; here are the four provinces with the most, shall we say, "suspect" results:

There are a variety of documents collected here, though it's unclear how far-reaching the layoffs will be and whether Philosophy will be among the affected departments. (My read of the materials suggests that tenured faculty at risk are in units that may be eliminated, and I see no indication that includes Philosophy.) Any insight from those at FSU? Philosophy at FSU has been a huge success story over the last dozen years, hopefully it will weather this crisis.

Here. And the book is here. Professor Braver kindly sent me the book some time back, but I regret I've not had a chance to read it. But since the book aims to investigate thematic affinities between "Continental" and Anglophone traditions in philosophy, it might be of particular interest to some readers.

They are: Epifanio Sonny Elizondo (UCLA, for "The Pleasures of Agency: Kant on Morality and Happiness"), Stanislaus Husi (Rice, for "Building Reasons"), Christiana Olfert (Columbia, for "Building the Soul: Aristotle's Constitutive View of Virtue"), Christopher Raymond (Texas, for "Shame, Reason, and Virtue in Plato's Ethics"), and Karim Sadek (Georgetown, for "Islamic Democracy: The Struggle for and Limits of Recognition"). (I was pleased to write on behalf of Mr. Raymond who, in addition to his dissertation on Plato's moral psychology, is doing very good work on Nietzsche.) A list of past Newcombe winners is here.

Beckwith calls this light humor (at your expense), but it's at the very least unprofessional.

I'm sure this is the kind of thing Jesus recommends his Catholic followers do: publicly make fun of people's appearance and compare them to sniveling, conniving cowards from TV shows.

Anyways, good luck with these people, and thanks for calling them on their bad behavior.

What is one to say about alleged adults and professionals who scour the Internet to find an insulting photo of someone and then post it to mock the person? What can one say? There were lots of photos from my session with Judge Posner, why did Francis Beckwith choose the one he posted? There are easily available professional photos of me, why would an alleged adult and professional go out of his way to find a bad photograph of someone and post it? What's wrong with him? Does anyone know?

John Bickle (philosophy of mind, science, and cognitive science), Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cincinnati, has accepted a senior offer from the Department of Philosophy at Mississippi State University, where he will also become Head of Department. The MSU announcement is here.

The Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science at the University of California at Irvine has made a senior offer to Hannes Leitgeb, Professor of Mathematical Logic and Philosophy of Mathematics in the Departments of Philosophy and Mathematics at the University of Bristol.

UPDATE: Professor Leitgeb has declined the offer, a significant retention coup for Bristol and its very strong logic group.

It's actually a new journal of ideas put together by some PhD students in the Committee on Social Thought here at the University of Chicago. They have some selected content on-line. I particularly enjoyed in the print version the entertaining piece on the "creation museum" in Kentucky by Tom Stern (UCL), which drew some nice connections with Nietzsche's discussion of the problem of suffering in the Genealogy (though went off the rails at the end in comparing scientists to priests!).

For those who might be interested, this long-gestating paper with philosopher of biology Michael Weisberg (Penn) is now on-line at the Law & Philosophy site, and will appear in a print edition of that journal later this year.

Canada, which is, like Israel, usually so much more civilized than the U.S. when it comes to the ability to have frank public discussion of competing perspectives on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, is on the verge of international humiliation. Having failed in the earlier effort to get York University to shut down an academic conference on a one-state solution to the conflict, the would-be censors have now prevailed on some politicians to put pressure on the Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council, which is providing funding for the event, to submit the conference proposal to an unprecedented second round of peer review, with the obvious purpose of trying to de-fund it at the SSHRC level, having failed to squelch it at the university level. My colleague Leslie Green has sent the following letter to Profesor Chad Gaffield, a distinguished historian at the University of Ottawa, who is President of the SSHRC:

If the report in the Globe and Mail of 10 June is accurate, Canada'sScience Minister, the Hon. Gary Goodyear, "has asked SSHRC presidentChad Gaffield to convene a second peer-review committee to assess if the[York University] conference is still worthy of public funds...." :

I hope that this report is inaccurate. It if is accurate, I very muchhope that you will decline the request to re-review a properlypeer-reviewed proposal for a conference on a timely and importantissue. In Canada and abroad, senior academics are watching thiscontroversy with great concern. I believe it would seriously injurethe independence and mission of the SSHRC, not to mention the value ofacademic freedom on which all our work depends, were you to acceed thethis overtly partisan request.Yours sincerely,

Les Green

--Leslie GreenProfessor of the Philosophy of LawUniversity of OxfordBalliol College, Oxford OX1 3BJ

& Professor of LawOsgoode Hall Law School,

This really is an extraordinary embarrassment for Canadian higher education. The one-state solution is discussed all the time in Israel, and even those who reject it don't waste their time trying to shut down university conferences on the subject. Hopefully Professor Gaffield can resist the unethical political pressure being brought.

Daniel Jacobson (ethics, metaethics, aesthetics), Professor of Philosophy at Bowling Green State University, has accepted a senior offer from the Department of Philosophy at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where he took his PhD in the early 1990s. He will start at Michigan this fall.

I was fortunate to overlap in grad school with Dan at Michigan between 1988 and 1991, and have followed and learned from his work ever since. Dan is also now writing the volume on Mill in The Routledge Philosophersseries, and I am sure this will be an important and much-discussed book. In any event, that's an excellent appointment for Michigan.

Short answer: no. I've just been skimming this entertaining paper, not sure whether it distinguishes between Kantians, who (with some honorable exceptions of course!) tend to behave pretty badly (they are blinded by righteousness), from other kinds of moral philosophers.

Here is a question on the ethics of teaching philosophy in a small department. I can imagine circumstances in which a philosopher only gets to teach one course a year in their specialism (because the department is small but it needs to cover as much of the whole cannon as possible). That one course might be the students' only exposure to your area. Do you have a duty to give a survey for that course too (even if this means you only get to give a single lecture, say, on the topic of your PhD---or whatever other topic most interests you personally)?

The students' education might be better served by the survey course, but on the other hand it would only be the handful of students who take philosophy further that would be disadvantaged, and teaching what really interests you helps with your research and keeps you sane.

Any thoughts?

Comments are open; please post only once, comments may take awhile to appear.

Do the poster and commenters think that a relevant disanalogy arises from the fact that Tiller performed late-term abortions only when either the fetus was discovered to have a severe defect or when the woman's health was threatened? If not, why not? It certainly seems to me that even if I thought Tiller and others had reached the wrong conclusion that I could recognize the moral question as sufficiently difficult that a comparison with Jeffrey Dahmer was beyond the pale. Indeed, what is the purpose of making such a comparison? Surely it is not meant to rationally persuade others to your conclusion. You can't possibly have sat down to write this post thinking that you would change anyone's mind by this argument.

Furthermore, your injunction against vigilantism rings a bit hollow. Do you really mean for this to be an absolutely inviolable principle? Suppose a racist government refuses to protect a minority from persecution. Don't members of the minority have a right to protect themselves? Or, suppose a government refuses to outlaw rape. Would it not be justifiable to protect women by means outside the law? Do you really believe that there are absolutely no circumstances in which vigilante action is justified? I suspect insincerity. You offer a tenuous premise as the only reason more doctors should not be murdered. In light of the fact that your main argument cannot possibly be construed as an attempt to persuade and in fact adds nothing but incendiary rhetoric, I'm inclined to conjecture that the injunction against vigilantism is just cover for an incitement to further violence. That is, I suspect some might read this post and think "if the government had refused to stop Dahmer, I would have"; furthermore, I suspect you know that.

UPDATE 6/6: Professor Feser's non-reply. A word for Professor Feser: it is not a "lie" to call you on your morally depraved rhetoric (and to link to your very words to prove the point!). Anyone in their right mind can see what the point of comparing an abortion provider to a serial killer/cannibal actually is, and it isn't to lend weight to your two or three (prudent) sentences expressing nominal objections to his murder (cf. Mr. Shipley's remarks, quoted above). The entire profession, except perhaps a few fringe lunatics (most of whom are already your co-bloggers), understands what's going on, which is why no one objects to my calling you on it. Your hysterical rhetoric in reply is just a giveaway that you know you've been caught red-handed, as it were. You and your co-bloggers are, indeed, "what's wrong with the world," as many readers of this blog have noted before. ADDENDUM 6/8: Professor Feser, please calm down--I didn't link to your now lengthy "reply" to Mr. Shipley because I hadn't seen it, because, unlike you, I don't spend the entire day reading blogs. The post I did link to was your purported reply to me. I am happy to link to your reply to Shipley, since all readers can assess its merits for themselves, just as all readers can assess whether or not you are an apologist for murder, since I linked to your comments in the first place. Of course, you know what you are, and that is why you're increasingly hysterical on this subject.

A FINAL UPDATE, 6/12: The comment section at the post linked above is instructive, both about Feser and his readers, who seem to have a lot of trouble staying focused on the issue at hand. Professor Feser reports deleting some of the personal attacks on him, but, being a high-minded and honorable fellow (unlike all his critics, of course), he left all the personal attacks aimed at me--including his own:

And what do you think Nietzsche would have thought of a pathetically status-obsessed egalitarian university professor whose "living dangerously" consisted of firing off nasty blog posts from the comfort of an office building, and only ever targeted at people he thought couldn't hurt him professionally?

Since no on else cares about this freak show, let me address my remarks to its main audience. Professor Feser, you're obviously burning with fury that I've called you out, more than once now, on your twisted view of the world, but surely you can do better than irrelevant personal attacks? I have focused on the appalling nature of your views, why not keep the focus there? When your fury subsides, I assume you will acknowledge that I do not produce rankings because I'm "status-obsessed": nothing has caused more harm to my professional "status" than producing them (I've remarked on this before, and it's obvious to anyone awake) and my actual opinion of lots of "high-status" academics is a matter of long public record. (Think for a moment about why someone sympathetic to Marx would be interested in rankings. You're not much of a philosopher, but you're not stupid, I'm sure you can figure this out.) And you know as well as I do that the list of people I've excorciated includes philosophers and academics of far more significance than you (that's the extent of my egalitarianism, I am an equal opportunity critic). I'm not as big a coward as most academics and I do say what I think. That I've been as professionally successful as I have been (is this part of what irritates you?) is attributable to some combination of smarts and good luck. It surely can not be attributed to my imprudent habit of targetting every religious fanatic, reactionary, mediocrity, and fool, whether they're at Harvard or Chicago or Pasadena City College. You and your swarmy co-blogger Beckwith had dropped off my radar screen until you showed up as apologists for discrimination against gay men and women and I started reading the extraordinarily deranged blog you folks produce. Catholicism and your sophomoric version of "natural law theory" do not excuse the moral depravity and venal creepiness of so much of what you folks believe. On the other hand, I confess I was amused by all the effort Professor Beckwith put in to his exercise in failed reasoning by analogy, but I assume it was prudence on his part to depart from normal practice at WWWW and not open comments, lest someone make the obvious points in reply. In any case, it's my intention to resume ignoring you, since mine and my readers' appetite for the "bizarro world" of WWWW (to borrow Professor Norcross's phrase) is probably sated.

On U.S. Middle East policy, a subject far more important to any Arab audience than an American president’s views on Islam or ability to cite the occasional Quranic passage, President Obama missed two golden opportunities. On Iraq, he could have issued a formal apology for an illegitimate war and the unspeakable reigns of terror presided over by the U.S. occupation, or noted his own early opposition to the U.S. invasion, or said nothing. Instead, he chose to make the ludicrous claim that Iraq today is a better place than in 2003.

On Palestine, he confirmed once again that American elites are more pro-Israel than Israel itself. Lengthy denunciations of Palestinian violence (Israeli violence was left unmentioned and presumed nonexistent); detailed exposition of the (European) Holocaust, an appropriate excursion into the conflict’s background which, however, becomes improper when simultaneously pretending Palestinians were transformed into a dispossessed and stateless people by a freakish act of nature; pre-conditions solely for Palestinians; and a determination to hawk damaged goods in the form of worthless initiatives long past their sell-by date. It’s the Occupation, Stupid! And that’s not a reference to Tel Aviv.

In sum, great presentation, mediocre substance and a seeming failure to recognize it’s all about policy, not respect. And when it comes to the U.S., policy is about much more than an initiative to promote female literacy.

I imagine the editors will be deluged with deranged e-mails and letters from readers who view any position to the left of Likud as a moral outrage.

My guess is that the reason PPR and Nous are swamped is because they have, by far, the most responsible reviewing process of the very top journals. They get back to people within a month, usually with helpful comments even if they reject. If they accept, you get to put a great 'forthcoming' publication on your CV, which can help you get a job or move up in the world even if the article takes forever to actually come out. As a junior faculty member, you have a strong incentive to choose them for an initial submission over other journals.

So Open Access is great, but a bigger issue is reviewing practices. If Open Access can help with that, then it's the best of all possible worlds. If not, there's still a real problem and the journals who address it--open access or not--will have to take frequent moritoriums.

Comments open for those who want to continue the 'open access' discussion or react to Professor Sommers's observations.

Some observations: (1) In many sciences, some of the most prestigious journals are now open access.

(2) In philosophy, only one open access journal (Philosophers’ Imprint) has a good enough reputation to be ranked among the 20 best philosophy journals (as per the ranking recently published in Leiter Reports); the top philosophy journals remain the usual ones.

(3) Some commercial publishers, such as Bentham, are now trying to establish for profit, open access philosophy journals, but their quality is questionable.

High quality, open access philosophy journals seem to be both desirable and feasible – witness Philosophers’ Imprint, not to mention the many prestigious open access journals in other fields. Why aren’t there more prestigious open access philosophy journals? Why haven’t open access journals been able to threaten the dominance of the old philosophy journals in the way they have done in other fields?